


alone, together

by poseidon



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Other, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-16 07:25:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13049313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poseidon/pseuds/poseidon
Summary: four moments before and one moment during





	alone, together

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



Cary never liked the beach. It’s loud and too hot and there’s sand and water everywhere and it’s never still enough for him to sit and think. It’s noisy in his mind, he doesn’t need the extra distractions.

Kerry likes it though. It’s loud and hot, yeah, but there’s so much happening all at once. So many sensations, everything feels vibrant and alive. People talking, wind in the air, heat of the sun on her skin, there’s so much happening at once and she gets to see it all.

An assault to the senses – senses she can only experience when she’s out there, alone, in her own body. The luxury of experience, it’s something she seldom gets but cherishes whenever she does.

“Sometimes I like to feel things on my own,” she tells Cary. He doesn’t respond, not immediately – they’re in a car, the driver’s already looking at him weird (what kind of guy in glasses and pale skin goes to the beach alone?) but she knows he gets it.

He sits all the way in the back, near some picnic benches, and he doesn’t look up once to watch her embrace the crashing waves or lie back and feel the sand sticking to her wet skin, coarse and rough, until it’s washed away by the waters.

In the back of her mind, somewhere, she feels his disdain, feels him brushing the nonexistent sand off his shoulders. _Nerd_ , she thinks, and the slight rumble in her chest from his laughter makes her smile.

She has to scrub herself clean in the shower before he lets her back in, standing right outside the tub and watching the dirt and salt run down the drain. He shakes his head. “I don’t know how you can stand it,” he mumbles quietly.

“I like it,” she says. She doesn’t have an explanation for it, but she doesn’t need to explain herself to him. She rubs shampoo into her hair, squeezing her eyes shut, and asks, “What does it feel like?”

“You know,” he replies. She feels him shrug. “Well… you know.”

“So why do you let me do it?”

He shrugs again and, oh, he’s smiling. She can’t help but smile too as he says, “You know I’ve never been one to deny myself.”

She’s laughing when she climbs back inside and despite it all, he smells a little like the sea.

* * *

Eating is. weird. Well, only if Kerry thinks about it. It’s just, she doesn’t really need to eat so she doesn’t

Cary picks this as his next project, trying to figure out how exactly eating works for her – half the time she doesn’t have a body of her own, so where does it go, how does it get energy, how much of the food Cary consumes goes into providing for her, et cetera, et cetera.

He makes her eat three meals a day, every day, for a month. They buy twice as many groceries, he cooks double the portions, she has to eat as much as he does so he can measure everything correctly.

“Blood pressure, cholesterol, calorie intake, weight,” he lists off as she picks idly at the scrambled eggs he’s put on her plate. She hates the way they look and she hates the way it feels in her stomach when she’s finished digesting it.

It doesn’t feel right. She’s not supposed to have something inside of her. It doesn’t feel. good.

Cary likes eating (as long as he remembers) and he keeps trying to get her to enjoy it as much as he does. Tastes, flavors, textures - he thinks it’s fun.

“How does it feel?” he asks around week three, hunched over a notebook as he logs in the day, time, and all the other numbers and data he gathered.

She shrugs. “Weird,” she settles on. “Better now, since, you know, but before it was just… weird.”

_Unnerving_ , he writes down. Sure, that’s close enough. He’s better with that sort of stuff anyway.

They end the experiment a week later, but not for a reason either of them expected: she got a hangover.

They didn’t _mean_ for it to happen but Cary wanted to celebrate one month of getting Kerry to eat consistently.

“We can get something special,” he suggests.

Kerry thinks about it for a moment. Something special, something people get on special occasions. “Let’s get beer.”

For all his smarts, Cary is sometimes surprisingly dumb. He gets her the beer and the next morning, when they’re both hanging over the edge of the toilet bowl, he looks at her with tired eyes. “Okay,” he says.

She’d respond, but her body doesn’t feel like it has the energy to do that, so she just stares at the floor and watches it spin around her.

They alternate between the bed and the bathroom for the rest of the day. Later, they’ll laugh about what a stupid idea this was. She doesn’t eat or drink ever again.

* * *

They experience pain twice. First, by themselves, in the initial stroke. A papercut on a finger, a broken arm, a shard of glass in the leg, it hurts and it hurts and it _hurts_.

And then it hurts again, in the echo. Or, well, the echo of the echo. The pain the other feels, it bounces back and then it’s almost twice as bad. It ends quickly for the other but it still hurts for the injured. Oh, it hurts a lot.

It’s different than, say, getting ill.

Cary’s the only one who gets sick - his is the main body, he’s the one who’s eating and drinking and dealing with the most germs. He gets the flu a lot. His nose closes up and he coughs all the time and he just lies in bed and mumbles vaguely about what he wants Kerry to do before he passes out on her before she’s had time to even get out of him.

“Gotta reset the breakers,” he mumbles while she checks his temperature. It’s high, he’s sweating into the blankets, but she thinks it’ll break soon.

“Okay,” she says. “Do you want me to make you more soup?”

He nods. “Soup. Soup is nice.” He’s asleep by the time she comes back, mouth hanging open and a slight amount of drool spilling down the corner of his lips. She wipes it off carefully and just sits beside him, in silence, until he wakes up.

Seeing him asleep is different than seeing him through his eyes. Through his eyes, they see him through a mirror. She’s the only one of them who gets to see him objectively, without mirrors, from a different point of view.

He mumbles something and shivers, and her body shivers too, a little. Not nearly as bad as his, they still don’t have much of an explanation as to why he gets sicker when all she gets is the rare sneeze, but, well, some things don’t need explanation.

His eyes open slightly, just enough that he sees her, before they close again. “The breakers?”

“Yup,” she says. “When you wake up, we’ll finish it.”

“Okay.” He shifts a little in his blankets and she waits a few seconds before tucking him in, keeping him cozy. It makes her body feel nice too but she isn’t doing it for herself. Or, maybe, she kind of is.

She shuts down that train of thought before it gets too confusing.

* * *

She’s never been kissed. Cary has, a few times. back in college. He went to some party somehow on accident, there’d been some drunk people, the details were never clear, she has a vague recollection of what it was like because at the time she just didn’t care, but.

“I think I want to get kissed,” Kerry says, all of a sudden. She’s on the couch, curled up and watching some movie she’s already forgotten the name of. He’s in the kitchen, on the counter, transcribing some notes from one notebook to another. It’s his thing.

“Okay,” he says.

She turns in her seat and looks over at him. “What’s it like?”

“You know,” he shrugs. He pauses and puts his pen down for a second, then shrugs again. “Overrated, I think.”

“ _You_ think,” she repeats. “What about what _I_ think?”

He scratches his chin a little, leaning back in his chair. “Well, I guess I could kiss you. I have the most experience.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’ve only been kissed once, nerd, that’s not what anyone would call experienced.” His pen misses by a wide margin when he throws it at her and she’s laughing when she hands it back to him, returning into the comfort of his body for a bit while he sits down and finishes the movie for her.

Cary eventually does kiss her, just to help ease her curiosity. It’s not at all what they make it out to be in the movies or the books – there’s not a big sudden burst of energy, she doesn’t feel like she’s turning into stars, the world doesn’t tilt on its axis, it’s just.

He presses his lips against hers and she presses hers against his and then they pull apart.

“Huh,” she says, when it’s over. “I think I liked it better when you masturbate.” And he trips on nothing as he brings her back inside of him.

* * *

In the middle of everything – after Oliver and Walter, before Syd and David – there’s just Melanie. It’s mostly Cary that deals with her, Kerry doesn’t think much of her. She’s sort of just. there. Hovering in the background, watching them with careful eyes, examining them and their interactions.

She’s a scientist. She’s nothing like Cary, and Kerry doesn’t like that. She liked Oliver – Oliver was weird, he didn’t do things in the normal way, he never thought they were strange, he was. He was just like them.

“You can’t blame her for wanting to understand us,” Cary says in that tone of his – the one where she knows he’s being right and reasonable but it means that she can be a little unreasonable in response.

“Her husband was a mutant, she should understand us better,” she counters. She pulls out and grabs a beaker from behind him, then pulls back in.

“Sure, but mutants are all different,” he points out. He sighs when he feels her skepticism and shakes his head. “Give her some time. She just lost her husband, we don’t know where Walter went, there’s a lot happening with her. Give her time, she’ll come around.”

Time goes on. Melanie watches them down in the labs sometimes, not to help or anything but just to see what experiments they’re running. Sometimes she spots them in the breakroom and Kerry sees her visibly flinch when she pulls out of Cary.

Cary notices these things, the weird way she looks at them that everyone else does, sure, but not people who deal with mutants like them should. Oliver didn’t. The other mutants don’t. But she does.

Kerry doesn’t get it, not until she’s leaving the lab to grab something Cary left in their room and she nearly bumps right into Melanie. She takes a step back and Melanie looks her over carefully. “What’re you doing? Where’s Cary?”

“I’m getting something for him,” Kerry replies. She doesn’t think she likes her tone or the way she’s looking at her and she’s about to confront her about it when.

“It’s nice that you always have each other to count on, isn’t it?” she says, all of a sudden. Kerry doesn’t respond so she continues. “You trust each other so completely and no matter what happens, you’ll always have each other, won’t you?”

Kerry watches her walk away and it takes her a few seconds to remember what she was even supposed to be doing. She returns to the lab with Cary’s book under her arm, then pauses a moment at the door.

“You trust me, right?” she asks.

“Of course I do,” he replies, unhesitant, unflinching, without even looking. She tosses the book at his back and he catches it before it hits him.

“Okay,” she says. “Just checking.”

They move on with their lives. Kerry hates Melanie a little less.


End file.
